Beyond the Pale (14 page)

She pressed the accelerator and drove on. A minute later it struck her. She had seen the antlers, but something about the shadow had been wrong. Then she had it. How many deer walked on two legs?

She shook her head. Her eyes were playing tricks on her, that was all. Sleep-deprived interns in the ED were known to hallucinate.

“You’re tired, Grace,” she said. “You’re way too tired. You’re going to get yourself killed.”

She glanced at the dashboard clock. Almost three in the morning. She was far away from Denver now. It would be safe enough for her to pull over to sleep, just for an hour or two. At least, she had to believe it was.

Just ahead, in the dimness, she glimpsed an abandoned building next to the road. In front was a flat area. It would
do. She slowed down, pulled off the highway, and brought the car to a halt before the blocky hulk. With a yawn she shut off the ignition and reached to flick the switch for the headlights.

Something made her hesitate. She gazed through the window at the abandoned structure. It was impossible, but this place seemed familiar to her. She felt a tingling against her chest, lifted a hand, and touched the pendant through the fabric of her blouse. Compelled by a force she could not name, she opened the car door and stepped out.

She shivered as the wind tangled cold, substanceless fingers through her hair. Silence ruled the night. Before her, half-revealed by the headlight beams, the old building glowered against the sky. A dozen empty windows stared out like hooded eyes. Of all the places where she might have driven that night, of all the roads she might have traveled, what trick of fate or long-submerged memory had led her here? She knew this place. This was where it had all begun. This was where she had first learned about the existence of evil.

The Beckett-Strange Home for Children.

Grace approached the ruin. It was difficult to believe she had spent ten years of her childhood here. But it was just miles from this place, on a mountainside, that she had been found as a child: no more than three years old, alone, abandoned. It was here she had been given her Christian name, Grace. It was from this place her legal name, Beckett, had come. And it was within these walls she had first learned to treat the wounds of others.

Much of the Home’s roof had collapsed inward, and only a few shards of glass clung to the window frames to glint like broken teeth in the last of the moonlight. The board nailed over the entrance had fallen to one side, and through the gap, brooding in shadows, she glimpsed the front door. Its surface still bore the blistered scars of old fire. The building was just a husk now, like the cast-off skin of a snake—an empty reminder of the evil that had once dwelled within. Even after all these years, a burnt smell hung on the air. But the fire had come last of all, and long before the fire there had been the cries of owls, and the hands reaching out of the dark.

A voice spoke behind her and jerked her back to the present.

“Can I help you, child?”

Grace gasped for breath, like a swimmer who had just surfaced after long submersion. She turned around and blinked against the glare of the car headlights. He stood before her, although she had not heard him approach, an unusually tall man clad in a shabby black suit that hung loosely on crooked scarecrow limbs. Eyes glinted like chips of obsidian in the cratered moonscape of his face.

“Who are you?” she whispered, but even as she asked the halting question she thought she already had an inkling of the answer. For there was something about him—in his old-fashioned clothes and in his ancient, knowing gaze—that reminded her of the purple-eyed girl she had encountered in the park.

With long fingers, the man in black touched the edge of his broad-brimmed pastor’s hat and affected a mock bow. “The name is Cy,” he drawled in a voice smooth and gritty as new-oiled rust. He reached out, as if to hand her a calling card. “That’s Brother Cy. Purveyor of faith, peddler of salvation, and prophet of the Apocalypse. At your service.”

“I see,” she said breathlessly, for it was an introduction difficult to fathom in just one hearing. She glanced down and saw that instead of a calling card, her cupped hand held only a faint glow of starlight, and as she watched even this ran through her fingers and was gone. To conceal her startlement, she blurted out her own name. “I’m Grace. Grace Beckett.”

Brother Cy gave an absent nod, as if he already knew this fact, or did not care. His eyes flickered past her to take in the brittle shell of the orphanage. “The past lies dark and heavy on this place. Can you feel it?”

“Yes,” she said after a moment, for she could.

He brushed bony fingers against scorched clapboards. “Even fire and time cannot make the wood forget. Not entirely. The memory of evil lingers in the grain.”

Grace crossed her arms over her chest. How could they know so much? Both of them—this weird caricature of a preacher, and the ethereal, porcelain-doll girl.

She whispered it again, desperate now. “Who
are
you?”

A grin, both terrible and impish, split Brother Cy’s visage. “We are what we are and have always been. We go where the winds of chance blow us, and do what our natures require. But then, who is anyone, child?”

It was testament to Grace’s odd frame of mind, and the disconnection she felt from all that she had once thought of as real, that his words almost made sense. She turned her back to him and gazed once more upon the orphanage. “Can we never be free of the past then?”

“No, child,” Brother Cy said from behind her. “We cannot shape the past, for it is the past that shapes us, and without it we would be as dim shadows, lacking form or substance.” There was a long pause. Then, “You cannot shape the past, and the future is beyond our reach, but remember this, child: You do possess the power to shape your present.”

Grace searched the blistered slab of the orphanage’s door. What would she glimpse if she were to open it? Would she see clumps of dry thistles nestled among burnt timbers, scattering downy seeds like fine ash? Or would she see a small girl, shivering in a torn nightgown in a corner? Present or past? She didn’t know.

“Then find out,” came Brother Cy’s raspy whisper. “Open the door, and see what lies beyond. Only then will you know.”

“I can’t,” she said in dread, even as a queer compulsion blossomed in her chest. Yes. Why had she come to this place if not to open the door?

She felt something small and cool being pressed into her hand. Her fingers closed around the object.

“It is merely a token,” Brother Cy said. “Yet in it there may reside some small reservoir of strength. And by it, perhaps, you will better remember my words.” The preacher’s whisper grew faint, as if he receded into a far distance. “Open the door, child. What you see beyond is up to you.…”

The preacher’s words melded into the night wind, and Grace knew she was alone. Step by step she approached the door of the orphanage. Her heart fluttered at this strange homecoming she had never imagined. The scarred door stood before her. She reached out and closed her hand around the tarnished knob, almost surprised to find it cold against
her skin rather than molten with fire. For a second she held her breath. Then she turned the knob. With a creak, the door swung open before her.

At first she saw only darkness, and she was afraid maybe that was all there was left for her. Then something cold and damp touched her face. A moment later another chill, feathery caress brushed against her cheek, followed by another, and another. Then she saw them in the glow of the headlights. Tiny flecks of white danced on the air and settled on her arms, her hands, her hair. It was snow. Pure, white, beautiful snow. It swirled out of the door in a glittering cloud to surround her.

After all the day’s happenings it was, at last, too much. She reeled. The snow cast a veil before her eyes, and a rushing noise filled her ears. Past was forgotten. Present was forgotten as well. There was no light, nor was there darkness. There was only snow. A soft sigh escaped her lips and fogged on the icy air. Only dully did she hear a sound like a door shutting behind her.

Then Grace fell forward and sank into cold and perfect whiteness.

Hadrian Farr turned away from the burned-out building and raised a hand to shield his face against gritty wind. The black helicopter lifted off the stretch of two-lane highway and rose over the abandoned structure, into the hard blue sky. From inside the plastic bubble the pilot saluted in farewell. Then, like an onyx insect, the helicopter sped away and disappeared behind the mountains that bounded the valley. The morning air fell still.

Hadrian lowered his hand and walked back to the sedan parked before the ruin—once an orphanage, according to the remnants of a sign he had stumbled upon. He had traded his suit of last night for wool pants and a fisherman’s sweater. He reached through the car window, opened the glove compartment, and switched off the transmitter inside. They had picked up the signal just after dawn, but the moment they
landed Hadrian had known they were already too late. Although obscured by the cloven hooves of a wandering deer, he had been able to follow Dr. Beckett’s footprints to the door of the structure. There her trail had ended. He had searched within the orphanage and found nothing but thistles and charred timber. It was as if she had vanished. However, Hadrian knew well people did not simply vanish. They always went … somewhere.

He pulled a small cellular phone from his pocket, pushed a button, and held the phone to his ear. A polite voice answered.

“I’ve located the car,” Hadrian said without preamble.

The voice asked a dispassionate question.

He shook his head. “No, there’s no sign of the subject. Nor do I expect to find any.” He drew in a deep breath before speaking the words. “I believe we have a Class One on our hands.”

The voice on the other end paused, then spoke again in careful tones.

“Yes, you heard me correctly.” An edge of annoyance crept into Hadrian’s voice. “That’s a Class One encounter. Extraworldly translocation.”

There was a long moment of silence. When the voice resumed, a note of excitement had broken through the formal veneer.

Hadrian nodded. “Yes. And send an observation team out here immediately. There may be residual signs—energy signatures or compound residues—I can’t detect on my own.”

The voice acknowledged his words. Hadrian pressed a button and slipped the phone back into his pocket. He gazed around. Dry grass danced under the lonely mountain sky. It was beautiful. He almost wished he could stay here, but there was work to do. He was to return to the charterhouse in London at once, to make a full report. Efforts to locate the ironheart known as Detective Janson had failed. However, last night, his operatives had managed to acquire the corpse of the ironheart from the morgue at Denver Memorial Hospital, and he had the photos he had taken of Grace Beckett’s necklace. Together, it would be enough to make his case for Class One determination. It would mean a great victory for him, perhaps even advancement. Class Three encounters—
rumors of extraworldly beings—were common. And while rare, Class Two encounters—meetings with those who had interacted with extraworldly forces—were well documented. But in the entire five-hundred-year history of the Seekers, there had been no more than a dozen Class One encounters: direct contact with an extraworldly traveler.

Hadrian sighed on the cool air. A mixture of emotions filled him. Excitement at having made so great a discovery. Concern for Grace Beckett, who was now far beyond his reach. And strange envy as well, to think she was almost certainly now experiencing that which he had always dreamed of. A Class Zero encounter—translocation to another world oneself.

He laughed at himself and shook his head. Hadn’t he found what most Seekers spent their entire lives searching for? Evidence of worlds other than this Earth? He climbed into the car and turned the key.

He pulled the sedan around, then paused by the highway to let a splotchy white school bus pass. Inside, the shadowy figure of the bus’s driver waved in thanks. Hadrian waved back, and the dilapidated vehicle roared by. He pulled onto the highway, then piloted the sedan in the opposite direction. A few moments later something caught his eye. Beside the road was a billboard. Its blank surface was covered with a fresh coat of primer-gray paint, ready for a new picture. Empty paint cans lay scattered in the grass before it. For a moment Hadrian imagined his life like that billboard: fresh, clean, ready to be worked anew. Maybe that was what it felt like to journey to another world.

A smile touched his lips. “Good luck, Dr. Beckett,” he whispered.

Engine purring, the sedan sped down the highway and left the blank billboard behind.

Travis blinked.

The first thing he noticed was that he stood in a forest. The second thing he noticed was that misty light filtered its way between the pale trees all around. He adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles before wide gray eyes. A moment ago the world had been cloaked in the dark of night. Now it was nearly dawn, and snow dusted the frozen ground. But how?